The Blood Telegram Page 29

  Still, Kissinger warned the president, Congress was indignant that they had not imposed a new total arms embargo. Reluctantly cutting his losses, Kissinger wanted to try to keep up economic aid to Pakistan, which was more important but also at risk from Congress. He explained to Nixon, “We are trying to make it so it at least the economic help can be given,” but “arms itself is hopeless.”33

  Nixon was appalled: “Are we for an arms embargo in Pakistan?” Kissinger gave him the public line: “In effect we have not sent any arms after April 1 except those in depots and it’s down to $3–5 million outstanding.” Nixon asked what they should say about future military export licenses. “Fudge it,” Kissinger replied. “No license at this time.” Nixon was disgruntled: “We will evaluate it as it goes along. We will have to take the heat on this.” “It’s not just but I know the problem,” said Kissinger understandingly. Nixon angrily said, “They are doing it for reasons of screwing us up. They want Pakistan to go down and screw us up. They want a war.”34

  Pakistan, as Kissinger’s aides put it, finally saw “the congressional handwriting on the wall.” Kissinger repeatedly told one of Yahya’s generals that he was not trying to pressure Pakistan, but broke the bad news that military shipments were endangering economic aid. When the general tried to get hold of some fifty tons of unlicensed military supplies currently sitting in New York warehouses, about $1 million of aircraft spares, Kissinger’s main concern was not getting caught in the act. He said, “Much would seem to depend on how many people know or might find out about such shipments”—a line so brazen that he later had it struck from the official notes.35

  Kissinger told the president that the problem was that there was “no military aid to Pakistan, they are not even getting economic aid. If anything will tempt the Indians to attack, it will be the complete helplessness of Pakistan.” Nixon said, “After all they have done, we just aren’t going to let that happen.”36

  “SICK BASTARDS”

  Kissinger, in his Situation Room meetings, ripped into India, in terms only somewhat less vehement than he used when he was alone with Nixon. He warned, “The Indians should be under no illusion that if they go to war there will be unshirted hell to pay.” He doubted the sincerity of India’s humanitarianism: “I have my own views on the Indian attitude toward human suffering.” And he said, “My impression is that the Indians have a tendency to build to hysteria from which they won’t know how to escape.”37

  But the State Department revolted at this. Pushing back, one top official highlighted Pakistan’s persecution of Hindus, and criticized Kissinger for behaving as if “the only way to move the Indians is with a stick.” When Kissinger said that Yahya, still trying to come up with a viable plan for the refugees, “has been pretty good about the refugees,” senior State Department officials gagged.38

  Harold Saunders, the senior White House aide, bleakly told Kissinger that the Hindu refugees would probably never return. Both in India’s refugee camps and inside East Pakistan, the international relief effort had fallen short and was doing little to lighten the burden. When Congress added $100 million in aid to India, Saunders did not think it enough. Something needed to be done to reduce the Bengalis’ “pervasive sense of fear.” Saunders asked his boss to “delicately” use some of the United States’ influence before it was too late.39

  After four months of resisting it, Kissinger was by late July openly willing to discuss pressuring Pakistan. Congress was hyperventilating; the China channel was less of a factor; and he needed to find a way to prevent Indira Gandhi from attacking Pakistan. “Both the President and I have some money in the bank” with the Pakistanis, he said. “We might get them to do something if we know what we want them to do.” He told his officials that the White House was ready to press Pakistan.40

  But after so much killing, it was hard to see what could really make a difference. Whatever faint hopes that U.S. officials had once held that Yahya would make a political accommodation in East Pakistan, they were by now thoroughly dashed. The White House and State Department staffs were unanimous that there had been no political progress.41

  The only prospect for avoiding war was a deal between Yahya and a popular Awami League leadership, restoring enough calm in East Pakistan that refugees could come home without fear. “It seems inevitable that any political process will end with some degree of autonomy for East Bengal,” Kissinger told a Situation Room meeting on July 23, finally coming around to what many of them had been unsuccessfully telling him since before the shooting started. “The Pakistanis don’t have the political imagination to do this themselves.”42

  But soon after, he was skeptical about a political bargain. India, he believed, thought that such a deal meant splitting Pakistan in two. He wanted to urge Yahya to restore some political participation to the Bengalis, but thought that India would go to war before Yahya managed to do that. It was, he told a trusted official, better to talk to Yahya “with love rather than with brutality.” When he told Nixon that the State Department was “screaming for political accommodation,” the president, showing no interest in asking Yahya to deal with the Bengalis, said, “We’ve just got to give plenty of relief, that’s all.”43

  The best chance for a breakthrough would be for Yahya to negotiate autonomy with Mujib himself, the Awami League’s top leader—a bold move that would impress Bengalis and give their leadership an incentive to lay down their arms. But Kissinger insisted that Yahya would not deal with Mujib. He also ruled out pressing Yahya to work with the Awami League. He resented India’s belief that the only deal that would stick would include Mujib: “The Indians have a right to want to get the refugees off their territory but they have no right to insist on any particular political formula to do so.” Emboldened, the State Department recommended a tough approach to Yahya, including having Nixon send him a letter asking him to make peace with the Awami League and stop destroying Hindu villages.44

  In the privacy of the Oval Office, Nixon and Kissinger were in despair as they waited for India to smash Yahya. Nixon, told that a desperate Yahya would probably attack India, was crushed by the prospect of Pakistan’s defeat. “He will commit suicide,” Nixon said. Kissinger once again compared Yahya to Abraham Lincoln, whose bust sat behind Nixon’s desk: “He will fight. Just as Lincoln would have fought. To him East Pakistan is part of Pakistan.”

  Turning fatalistic, the president said, “Inevitably it will be a bloodbath down there.” He railed against India: “We warned the Indians very strongly that if they start anything—and believe me it would be a hell of a pleasure as far as I am concerned—if we just cut off every damn bit of aid we give them, at least for whatever it’s worth.”45

  Kissinger fumed at his Democratic critics, pointedly telling Robert McNamara, “We think that the orgy here—people who urged us to ignore Biafra are asking us to brutalize Pakistan.” He said, “The Indians are playing an absolutely ruthless game.” Nixon angrily told Kissinger, “It’s just ridiculous, those goddamn Indians. As you know, they’re just as much at fault in this, frankly, as the Pakistanis in my opinion.”46

  In a Situation Room meeting, Kissinger defended the president’s man. “We’re not out of gas with Yahya,” he said. “Yahya will be reasonable.” He preferred to be gentle with Yahya, not hectoring or squeezing him. When a State Department official suggested getting the army out of running East Pakistan, Kissinger stood up for Pakistan’s sovereignty: “Why is it our business to tell the Pakistanis how to run their government?” The official said that they could give advice to a friend, at which point Kissinger exploded: “What would an enemy do to Pakistan? We are already cutting off military and economic aid to them. The President has said repeatedly that we should lean toward Pakistan, but every proposal that is made goes directly counter to these instructions.”47

  Kissinger would later recall these fights as the most profound split between the White House and the State Department in Nixon’s presidency, except perhaps for Cambodia. In private, Ki
ssinger raged, “State is driving me to tears.” He ripped into their senior ranks, calling one official “an idiot” and another “a maniac” and “such a whore.”48

  Nixon and Kissinger wanted retribution against their underlings. They fixated on Kenneth Keating, the ambassador to India who had dared to challenge the president in the Oval Office, and was still firing off angry cables. Despite his formidable connections and credentials, the former Republican senator’s job was on the line. “All things being equal, I think they would have removed Keating,” says Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s staffer at the White House.49

  “We’ve got to put some kind of a leash on Keating,” Nixon told Kissinger. The president recalled with satisfaction that when he had raised this with William Rogers, the secretary of state had said that Keating was senile. Nixon later said, “Keating’s a traitor.”50

  Nixon told Kissinger that they should fire him. The Indians, Nixon said, were “Awful but they are getting some assistance from Keating, of course.” Kissinger agreed: “A lot of assistance; he is practically their mouthpiece.” He added, “He has gone native. As I told you, I saw the Indians and listened to their complaints and Keating kept interrupting and saying but you forgot to mention this or that.” (This was false: in the meetings in Delhi, Keating only spoke once, to break an awkward silence in the conversation with Indira Gandhi.)51

  Nixon said, “I think we ought to get moving on him; he is 71 years old.” “Yes,” replied Kissinger, “but he would do us a lot of damage now”—the inevitable congressional outrage if their old colleague was pushed out. “We should wait until things quiet down.” Nixon said, “Two or 3 months and then I think we ought to do it.”52

  Keating proved too powerful to oust, but lower-ranked officials in the Dacca consulate were not so lucky. “These guys were troublesome,” remembers Hoskinson.

  The president was still seething at Archer Blood. When the loyal ambassador to Pakistan, Joseph Farland—treated to an Oval Office meeting with Nixon and Kissinger as a reward for his work with Yahya on the China channel—brought up Blood, Nixon exclaimed, “He’s no good.” Blood, Farland said, “blew the whistle on the whole thing.” Nixon asked, “He’s bad, isn’t he?” Farland replied, “Well he’s gone. He’s here in the Department now.”53

  That was not all. Nixon and Kissinger heard the full extent of the reprisals taken against the dissenters in Dacca. Brian Bell, the top United States Information Service officer in Dacca, had bravely reported and wrote some of the most devastating accounts of the bloodshed, and had signed the Blood telegram. He did not scare easily: a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Evening Star and the Associated Press, he had briefly played professional football for the Washington Redskins and the Detroit Lions before a knee injury ended his sports career. Farland said that Bell had been “just as tendentious in his reporting” as Blood. For that, Bell had been suitably punished: “Got rid of him.” “Good,” said Nixon.54

  Next was Eric Griffel, another signatory of the Blood telegram, the rebellious development officer who had confronted Kissinger on his recent visit to Pakistan. Farland told Nixon and Kissinger, “The one remaining, who is a very critical situation, this fellow Eric Griffel, who is the head of AID, he will be out in September. I wish he were out now. I don’t think you could pull him out without—” Nixon finished the thought: “Repercussions.” Farland agreed: “repercussions on the Hill. And my guess is that he has been instrumental in leaking some of this information.”

  “Sick bastards,” said Nixon. “You just keep right after it on this thing.”55

  ROCK AND ROLL

  George Harrison knew the uses of celebrity. The guitarist for the Beatles, who had broken up in 1970, was a soulful, confused, and tender-hearted man, but also an unexpectedly politically savvy operator.

  Over the last few years, he had grown close with Ravi Shankar, the famed Indian musician. Harrison spent six weeks in India, gulping in lessons in the sitar and spirituality; sitar music popped up in classic Beatles songs like “Norwegian Wood.” Now, as the number of refugees in India soared into the millions, Shankar, a Bengali, asked Harrison for help with a benefit concert.56

  Other musicians spoke up too, such as Joan Baez, who wrote a mournful “Song of Bangladesh.” But Harrison had a practical purpose in mind—to raise some money, as he later explained, but mostly to raise awareness that Bengalis “were getting killed and wiped out, and there was a lot of countries were supporting Pakistan with armaments and stuff.” Since the concert was being held in New York, there was no doubt about which country in particular Harrison and his friends had in mind.

  The Concert for Bangladesh was the first rock event for humanitarian relief—the precursor for shows like Live Aid in 1985, with all the attendant sincerity, vapidity, and showy self-righteousness. Harrison and his crew threw together the event at breakneck speed, choosing August 1 because it was the only date on which Madison Square Garden, in midtown Manhattan, was available. Two shows sold out fast to more than forty thousand fans.57

  Under the spotlights, in a cream suit with a hideous orange shirt, sporting shaggy hair and a huge scraggly beard, Harrison was a fervid countercultural figure to dumbfound the generals in Rawalpindi. With rather more adrenalized benevolence than comprehension, he ardently sang, “Bangla Desh, Bangla Desh / Such a great disaster, I don’t understand / But it sure looks like a mess / I’ve never known such distress.” Harrison had hastily assembled a scruffy all-star band from his old friends, including Ringo Starr on drums and Eric Clapton on guitar, although John Lennon and Paul McCartney never showed. Shankar and other Indian musicians played sitar to general puzzlement.

  Of course, the eager young crowd came mainly for the music. But many of them knew about the horrors, and Shankar explained to the audience the misery of the Bengalis. In between freewheeling sets, the musicians showed devastating films of the refugee camps, with corpses and starving children. The Village Voice wrote, “How glorious—to be able to launder one’s conscience by laying out a few tax-deductible dollars to hear the biggies.”58

  After a series of blazing performances, Harrison had a rare surprise. “I’d like to bring out a friend of us all,” he told the startled crowd, “Mr. Bob Dylan.” This, the Village Voice raved, was the “real cortex-snapping moment.” Dylan—who had been largely in seclusion since a near-fatal motorcycle accident—appeared from the darkness, slight and unmistakable, in a jean jacket, with a guitar and a harmonica. After the pandemonium subsided, he blazed through thrillingly emotional renditions of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” As if aiming at Nixon, he sang passionately, “How many deaths will it take till he knows / Too many people have died?”59

  The Indian government was delighted by this unexpected windfall, scrambling to get copies of Harrison’s record. For its part, Pakistan’s military regime was flummoxed by the power of rock and roll. The Pakistani authorities were humorlessly wrong-footed by Harrison and his hirsute musician friends. A Pakistani official warned all Pakistani embassies about an “Anti-Pakistan gramophone record entitled ‘Bangla Desh,’ ” which was “sung by George Harrison, a member of the Beatles’ Trio” (undercounting the Beatles by one). “It contains hostile propaganda against Pakistan.” This official, considering banning the song in Pakistan, ordered all of Pakistan’s embassies to somehow try to prevent its broadcast worldwide.60

  In the Oval Office, Nixon grumpily told Kissinger, “I see now the Beatles are up raising money for it. You know, it’s a funny thing the way we are in this goddamn country, is, we get involved in all these screwball causes.”

  Kissinger asked if the aid was going to Pakistan or India: “for whom are the Beatles raising money, for the refugees in India?” (Poignantly, both men were evidently unaware that the Beatles had broken up.) Nixon replied, “The goddamn Indians.” In that case, Kissinger thought that Harrison need not have bothered: “the Indian side of it is economically in good shape. We’ve given them $70 mill
ion, more is coming in.” (In fact, India would need more than ten times that amount to provide for a year of looking after the refugees.) The problem, he said, was Gandhi’s government: “no one knows how they’re using the goddamn money.” “You’re giving it to the government?” asked Nixon, appalled. “That’s a terrible mistake.” Kissinger said there was no choice: “they don’t let anyone in there. They permit no foreigners into the refugee areas. No foreigners at all. Their record is outrageous.”

  Perhaps fearing sounding soft, Kissinger quickly denounced India’s calls for a political deal between Yahya and the Bengalis, wanting to “get this goddamned lecturing on political structure stopped as much as we can. Eventually there’s gonna be autonomy in East Bengal, within the next two years. But not in the next six months. And the Indians are just playing a revolting, rough game.” Whatever George Harrison’s hopes of raising awareness, Nixon and Kissinger were not his audience.61

  “THE PAKISTANIS ARE A DIFFERENT BREED”

  Pressed beyond endurance, Nixon and Kissinger decided to whip the wayward State Department back into line. During a Situation Room meeting in August, the president surprised his top officials by summoning them to the Oval Office to lay down the law. Nixon said beforehand with satisfaction, “It’s good for them to get a little shock now and then.” Taken off guard, the officials from the State Department and other agencies anxiously trooped upstairs to the Oval Office. The president glowered at them. He insisted that his administration had to follow his policy.62